Finextra has wrapped up 2025 with a neat little “year in review” article that picks three themes: AI finally getting real, stablecoins getting mainstream political oxygen, and regulators loosening the collar a bit.
It’s a decent summary of what got top clicks and main stage at industry events and conferences.
It’s also maybe slightly dangerous, because I think it makes the year feel tidier than it actually was.
On the Fintech Daydreaming podcast this year, Ville and I kept ricocheting between two forces that felt like they were fighting for the same spotlight: GenAI and stablecoins.
So yes, I’ve got the same question as everyone else as we head into 2026.
What will takes centre stage at all the industry conferences in 2026?
The easy answer is GenAI, because it’s loud, visible, and it gives you something you can demo on a stage with a big screen and a confident smile. The more interesting answer is that stablecoins might quietly do more damage, or more good, depending on where you sit in the value chain. And the most European answer of all is that neither of these trends gets to run the show alone, because we’ve got a third character walking onto the stage whether we like it or not.
The digital euro.
And once you put the digital euro on the table, the stablecoin debate stops being a “fintech innovation” conversation and turns into something more political, more strategic, and frankly more awkward. It becomes a conversation about what anchors money in Europe, who controls the rails, and what role banks are expected to play when public money starts behaving more like a product.
Let me try to unpack this without pretending 2025 was plain sailing.
The spotlight and the plumbing
If I need a simple mental model to keep myself sane, this is what I use.
GenAI is the spotlight story. You can see it. You can feel it. You can watch it change customer expectations in real time, and you can watch the internal pressure building inside banks as people realise their best staff now have a new benchmark for what “productive” looks like. The moment someone uses a decent AI assistant at home, they start wondering why their day job still involves copying data between three systems and a PDF.
Stablecoins are the plumbing story. When stablecoin people (I feel like dropping in a “crypto bros” comment here, but I will refrain) are at their best, they’re not talking about memes and tokens. They’re talking about settlement, liquidity, reconciliation, and the fact that money still moves like it’s queueing behind a 1980s batch file in far too many places. They’re trying to make money movement behave more like modern software.
And in Europe, I keep coming back to a simple counterpoint: “We’re already building the boring version of that future. It’s called SEPA Instant.”
What I mean is not that SEPA Instant solves everything, but that it shifts the burden of proof. If you already have regulated instant account-to-account rails available, then stablecoins don’t win by being “instant”. They win only if they can do something meaningfully better on top of instant rails, at scale, with the same levels of consumer protection, recourse, and operational resilience.
And that’s where the debate gets interesting. Because it stops being a tech argument and becomes a business and governance argument. Do stablecoins reduce total friction in the real system, or do they just move the friction to the edges where it’s harder to see until something breaks?
The digital euro is something else again. It’s not a shiny fintech feature. It’s not really “innovation” in the way the industry uses the word. It’s a public anchor. It’s a policy decision in motion, and it exists because Europe is not keen on waking up one day to find that the next era of value transfer runs mainly on private, non-European rails.
That’s why “GenAI versus stablecoins” is a fun debate. But I think “GenAI and stablecoins in a world where public digital money is coming” is the debate that actually matters.
Why GenAI will dominate the conversation in 2026
I generally state that i do not make predictions, but if you force me to pick which topic will get the most executive oxygen next year, it’s GenAI.
Not because stablecoins aren’t interesting, but because AI touches everything. It’s a capability that leaks into every workflow and every channel, whether you planned for it or not. You can say you’re “not doing GenAI”, but your customers will still be using it, your staff will still be using it, and fraudsters will absolutely be using it.
The interesting change in 2026 won’t be “banks adopting AI”. Most banks already are, in some form. The interesting change is whether they keep treating AI like a project, or whether they finally accept that it has to be treated like a proper capability.
That sounds like a small distinction until you live it.
A project is a pilot. It’s a demo. It’s a controlled experiment with a slide deck at the end and a promise that you’ll scale it “next quarter”.
A capability has an owner, budget, governance, controls, and a real operating rhythm. It has someone whose job it is to make it work, improve it, measure it, and defend it when audit shows up. It’s not glamorous, but it’s the only way anything becomes real.
And this is also where the agentic angle matters.
The moment AI stops being something that answers questions and starts being something that acts, the whole game changes. When software can book, buy, switch, negotiate, subscribe, and pay, it becomes impossible to talk about AI without talking about payments rails, risk controls, and dispute handling. Because the customer’s “channel” isn’t a channel anymore. It’s a decision-maker.
Decision-makers love rails that are fast, cheap, auditable, and dependable.
Which brings us to stablecoins.
Stablecoins: I’m on the fence, and I’m leaning negative
I’ve tried to be open-minded about stablecoins for years. I’m still trying. I’m happy to be proven wrong. But I can’t pretend I’m a believer, because my instinctive reaction hasn’t really changed.
Stablecoins and crypto in general feel like casino chips to me.
Inside the casino, everything is brilliant. You move quickly. There’s always liquidity. Everyone seems confident. You can do a transaction in seconds and feel like you’ve just time travelled past half the banking industry.
Then you walk out of the casino and try to use those chips somewhere else, or you try to cash them out during a moment of stress, and suddenly the mood changes. People point to rules, redemption windows, jurisdiction, counterparties, reserves, and the unpleasant reality that “stable” is not a magical property. It’s a claim. Sometimes a very well-engineered claim, but still a claim.
This is the bit that stablecoin discussions often avoid, because it’s not as fun as talking about technology. But it’s the grown-up part of the conversation.
Money is not just speed. Money is enforcement and recourse. It’s what happens when something goes wrong, and who is accountable when it does. It’s the ability to redeem at par under stress, not just to transact at speed when everything is calm.
Now, to be fair to stablecoin advocates, regulation does change the discussion. When frameworks tighten, when reserve requirements and disclosures are enforced, when issuers are supervised properly, the “casino chip” problem becomes less true, at least for the more credible players. I’m not denying that. I’m just not ready to declare victory based on intent.
Because even if the issuer is solid, fragmentation is still the default state of the world. Different issuers, different jurisdictions, different rails, different compliance regimes, different settlement guarantees, different liquidity pools. Interoperability doesn’t arrive because someone writes “open” on a slide. It arrives because someone does hard, boring governance work for years.
So yes, stablecoins might absolutely become part of the plumbing. I just don’t think they automatically become “the future of money” simply because the technology is elegant.
And now for the European complication: the digital euro
Here’s where I think Europe needs to stop importing US narratives.
In the US, the stablecoin debate often feels like private innovation meeting regulation. Who can issue, what the reserves look like, what the rules of the road are.
In Europe, stablecoins land in a different room. They land in a room where there is an active public programme aimed at creating a digital form of central bank money, distributed through supervised intermediaries, with explicit intent around resilience, sovereignty, and the role of public money as an anchor.
That matters, because it changes the question European banks should be asking.
It’s not “do we like stablecoins?”
It’s “what is our role in the future money stack?”
If you are a European bank, you have at least three futures to plan for at the same time.
One future is private digital money rails gaining traction in certain settlement corridors, especially in B2B flows where the business case can be brutally rational.
Another future is the digital euro gradually turning from “policy discussion” into “programme reality”, with real scheme rules, real distribution expectations, and real implementation costs.
And the third future is that AI becomes increasingly agentic and starts routing value transfer like an optimisation problem. It won’t care about our opinions. It will care about what is cheapest, safest, fastest, and least likely to create a mess that requires a human to clean it up.
That’s why the digital euro matters in the stablecoin discussion. It doesn’t just add another rail. It changes the power dynamics. It changes what “money” means in the ecosystem. It forces banks and PSPs to decide whether they are builders, distributors, infrastructure operators, or reluctant participants.
And if you don’t choose, someone else will choose for you.
Diary of a Renovator: the IKEA gift card economy
During my kitchen renovation, I had a brief period where I became weirdly intimate with gift cards.
I am sure you have been looking out for when I would get to the kitchen renovation, and a quick plug for my book “Rip Out the Core“.
You know how it goes. Someone gives you a voucher for one specific shop and suddenly you are emotionally invested in buying something from that shop, because if you don’t, it feels like you’ve lost money. It’s irrational, but it’s also very real.
Inside IKEA, the gift card feels like proper money. It works everywhere in the store. You can even use it in the café, which is dangerously enabling. You start making confident decisions. You buy things you didn’t come for. You walk out feeling like an efficient adult.
Then you leave IKEA, and the gift card becomes what it always was: a promise that only has meaning inside that specific universe.
That’s what stablecoins feel like to me at their worst. They feel perfectly solid inside the ecosystem that treats them as solid, and then you remember that the hard bit is not transacting. The hard bit is what happens when you need redemption, recourse, and enforceable guarantees in the messy real world.
At their best, stablecoins grow out of that. They become boring, regulated, reliable plumbing. That’s the optimistic version, and I’m open to it. I just don’t want us to declare that we’re already there.
So who takes centre stage?
If “centre stage” means what dominates conversation, budgets, and organisational energy in 2026, it’s GenAI.
It’s not optional, and it’s not confined to one team. It changes distribution, operations, risk, fraud, software delivery, and customer expectation all at once. You can be sceptical about the hype, but you can’t ignore the gravity.
Stablecoins, meanwhile, are more likely to be a strategic chess move than an operating system. They will show up in targeted corridors, and they will be judged on boring outcomes like cost, speed, resilience, governance, and the ability to behave under stress. Not on vibes.
And in Europe, the digital euro is the quiet third actor that makes stablecoins harder to treat as a simple innovation story. Even before it is live, it changes the direction of travel. It forces decisions. It changes investment priorities. It shifts the regulatory and political context around private money.
So if you’re looking for a simple “winner”, I don’t think you get one.
What you get in 2026 is a collision.
AI becomes more agentic. Payments become more programmable. Public money becomes more present in the design of the system. Private money experiments become more regulated and more contested.
And that collision is where real winners and losers are created.
The question I want to leave you withas we end 2025
If you’re a bank exec reading this, don’t ask yourself “GenAI or stablecoins?”
Ask yourself something more uncomfortable.
What do we want to be when the channel becomes an agent and the money becomes programmable, and when Europe might introduce a public digital rail that changes the rules of the room?
Because that is not a technology choice. It’s a business choice.
It’s a choice about your role in the value chain, your control model, your risk appetite, and what you are willing to build versus what you are willing to rent.
And if you don’t make that choice deliberately, you’ll still make it.
You’ll just make it by accident.
And with that I wish you a successful and rewarding 2026
